Asylum For Sale

(Paperback)

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Description

A crucial, critical look at the increased for-profit forces in the international migration industry.

Through essays, artworks, photographs, infographics, and illustrations, Asylum for Sale offers a fresh and wholly original perspective by challenging readers to move beyond questions of legal, moral, and humanitarian obligations that dominate popular debates regarding asylum seekers. Digging deeper, the authors focus on processes and actors often overlooked in mainstream analyses and on the trends increasingly rendering asylum available only to people with financial and cultural capital.

'As long as there are borders and money to be made off the backs of migrants seeking freedom via the state, we must continue to expose the profit-makers and share our stories of resistance.Asylum for Saledoes exactly this. It reminds us that our people will never be truly free under capitalismand that we must not only challenge the capitalist state but destroy it and open borders for all. It is an urgent, inspiring, and necessary volume.' J amila Hammami, founder of the Queer Detainee Empowerment Project

Reviews

"As the frontiers of disaster capitalism expand, the same systems that drive migration are finding ever-more harrowing ways to criminalize and exploit the displaced. This book is part of how we fight back: connecting the extraordinary stories and insights of people studying, personally navigating, and creatively resisting the global asylum industry. An unparalleled resource."
--Naomi Klein, author of On Fire: The Burning Case for the Green New Deal

"As long as there are borders and money to be made off the backs of migrants seeking freedom via the state, we must continue to expose the profit-makers and share our stories of resistance. Asylum for Sale does exactly this. It reminds us that our people will never be truly free under capitalism--and that we must not only challenge the capitalist state but destroy it and open borders for all. It is an urgent, inspiring, and necessary volume."
--Jamila Hammami, founder of the Queer Detainee Empowerment Project

"A very important book. With a potent mix of theoretical rigor, empirical detail and vivid human witness, it helps to move the debate about asylum seekers beyond suffering and compassion to rights and resistance. In the process, it exposes the nature of the industry growing around asylum application systems; an industry of those demanding extortionate payments to overcome border fences, those erecting the fences, those detaining asylum seekers while they wait, the lawyers, the NGO--all with a self-interest in treating asylum seekers as voiceless victims without agency or capacity, pitted against citizens. This book conveys the possibilities of global citizenship, involving active solidarity with those who are crossing borders whether through choice or as a refusal of oppression. It is a vital resource for the struggle for global human rights--a struggle often led by those who are denied them."
--Hilary Wainwright, author of A New Politics from the Left

Author Bio

Siobhn McGuirk is an anthropologist, journalist, curator, and filmmaker. Adrienne Pine is a critical medical anthropologist and assistant professor at the American University. Seth Holmes is a cultural and medical anthropologist, physician, and faculty member at the University of California, Berkeley.